Miesha Louie is not the first musician to name an album Girls Girls Girls.

But her new record, which will be released March 9 on Calgary’s Saved by Vinyl, is not a tribute to Motley Crue’s sleazy hair-metal opus of 1987. Nor is it an homage to Elvis Costello’s 1989 compilation album of the same name. It has a deeper relevance for Louie, who forms the guitar-and-drum garage-rock duo Miesha and the Spanks with drummer Sean Hamilton.

It initially sprang from when the Spanks were a two-girl operation made up of Louie and former drummer Emelia Lovink. The two would hashtag everything they did with #girlsgirlsgirls and had plans to make an album under that name. But Lovink departed for Victoria more than two years ago and Hamilton became an official Spank. Still, Louie never lost the thread and she penned the metallic, chugging title track of the new album in solidarity with the strong females who were in her life.

“I wrote the song about me and my girlfriends and that girl-pack mentality,” says Louie, in an interview alongside Hamilton earlier this week at a Calgary coffee shop. “It’s about being there for each other and stuff like that.”

Girls Girls Girls is not a concept album, so the theme doesn’t endure throughout all 10 tracks. But it could be argued that Louie’s entire career has been inspiration for females in the indie-music trenches, whether by example or by running Girls Rock Camp Calgary with fellow musician Nicola Lefevre. Louie, who has instructed at the camp since 2013, says she was keen to provide role models and mentors for young girls aged 9 to 16 who want to enter an industry and genre that is traditionally “overrun by guys.”

It’s something that Louie wished she had when she was younger and starting out in the business. She came to Calgary after finishing high school in Invermere and joined the punk band BOGART! in the early 2000s. She remembers being excluded from a show early on because the bill already had a band with a female singer. Stranger still was that it was the other band, not the promoter, who had put this strange clause into their contact: No other girls allowed. It was just the reality back then, and the sort of thing that can prove intimidating to young women trying to get into the business.

“Can you imagine today if someone tried to do that?” says Louie. “I would love to have the opposite clause in our contact, saying there has to be a girl in every band.”

Of course, it’s difficult to imagine Louie as ever being easily intimidated. For more than a decade, she has persevered through countless cross-country tours, three full-length albums, a number of singles and EPs and — by her count — seven drummers, all the while presenting her tough but tuneful take on catchy punk and garage rock.

In fact, the creation of Girls Girls Girls may have partially come about thanks to a certain fearlessness on Louie’s part. In 2011, she was attending the Sled Island music festival and watching British punk icons the Buzzcocks at Calgary’s Olympic Plaza. Louie decided to jump the fence and help herself to some backstage beer and food and was caught in the act by Buzzcocks drummer Danny Farrant. It proved to be a serendipitous meeting, because he quickly enlisted her to be the band’s Calgary tour guide for the night. They became friends and eventually Farrant and his writing/producing partner Paul Rawson recruited Louie to add vocals to tracks they were working on for film and TV. When it came time for Miesha and the Spanks to record a full-length follow-up to the Ian Blurton-produced 2013 release Girls, Like Wolves, Louie contacted the pair and asked them to produce Girls Girls Girls. In 2016, Miesha and the Spanks offered a tantalizing taste of what was to come with the two-song EP called The Stranger, which was recorded at OCL Studios in Chestermere before being sent to England for Farran to add his production touches.

But the bulk of Girls Girls Girls was recorded during a 10-day recording session in Brighton, U.K., where Louie, Hamilton, Farran and Rawson pieced fragments of song ideas together into a strong and cohesive album that thunders out of the gate with the Spanks’ trademark guitar crunch and catchy sing-a-long choruses. Treasures abound, such as the tempo-shifting opener First Blood and melodic debut single Atmosphere. But while it may sound on the surface as if Louie and Hamilton didn’t stray too far from the Spanks’ guitar-and-drums blueprint, the musicians say that Farran and Rawson took the songs and sonics to a new level.

“They are really good songwriters and sculptors,” says Louie. “So they had a really good ear for what I was going for with a song and maybe didn’t know how to actualize and they brought those elements out. (The song) Stranger had a girl-group kind of sound. I didn’t know how to write but it was apparent I was going for that so they found the way to do the right backups to make it feel that way.”

“There were some drum beats I wasn’t able to play when we started that I had to learn while we were there,” adds Hamilton. “They are a crazy team like that. Because Danny sees the whole vision and the drums. He knows where everything is supposed to be but he can’t always articulate it. Then you have Paul who is like a virtuoso guitar player. They take what you have and mould it between the two of them. They really work as a unit.”

It was important that the two musicians were able to fully recreate the tunes on stage, which they will be doing during a Canadian tour that kicks off with a hometown show at the Ship and Anchor on Feb. 28. Anyone who has seen Miesha and the Spanks before knows that they offer a tight, intense, urgent and often fearfully loud set. It all comes from Louie’s determination in the past decade to build a fan base the old-fashioned way, making frequent trips across the country. As all Canadian bands quickly realize, touring the Great White North can be a taxing experience for all but the truly devoted.

“You’ve got to be in the right attitude,” Louie says. “You have to always see the best parts of what you’re doing because there’s a lot of negatives. Sometimes you don’t really get paid, or there’s three people at your show. There’s a lot of stuff that can go wrong so if you don’t love doing it, it’s not going to be fun.”

Miesha and the Spanks play the Ship and Anchor on Feb. 28. Girls Girls Girls will be released on March 9.

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